In present day point-of-sale (POS) operations, the MICR indicia that are to appear on the check of a customer are added after the sale, and at a remote location (i.e., either at the bank or in a separate, back room, retail site).
For the first time, this invention seeks to eliminate the post-operative role of supplying the required MICR indicia on a check presented for POS payment at a retail establishment. Owing to its new function, machines now being designed by the present assignee of this invention must be able to encode and read MICR characters located in one or more specific fields of the check (i.e., the amount field) at the point-of-sale.
In a MICR encoder of the inventive machine, the MICR characters must be printed at a precise distance to the right edge of the check in order to place the MICR in the proper field site. In order to accomplish this, an optical sensor is provided to detect the edge of the check and stage it at a known location from the thermal, MICR print head. It then becomes an easy matter to advance the check by a stepper, drive and print motor a fixed number of step increments in order to start the printing sequence.
Because a typical POS transaction printer must perform multiple printing, endorsing and, in the inventive printer, encoding operations, the check must often be moved back and forth (i.e., in and out of the printer) multiple times. In some cases the check must be "flipped" over so that printing may be performed on both its front and rear faces. A typical POS printer has a paper path with numerous potential obstacles which may cause paper jamming. It is important that any mechanical component not involved in the operation being performed at the moment be withdrawn from the paper path to minimize such jamming potential. Prior art mechanisms to withdraw print heads, platens and the like have relied either on complex mechanical arrangements driven by multiple motors or on electrical solenoids. In contradistinction, the MICR encoding station of the POS transaction printer of the present invention relies on a single stepper motor coupled to a unique cam and clutch mechanism to accomplish these tasks reliably in a very small volume of space. In addition, the inventive mechanism may be implemented at low cost with a minimum number of mechanical components.